I Was a Torture Chamber Addict [Part Two]

After the gushings of this post, where I fondly recollected my years addicted to Bikram's torture chamber, this post takes a darker turn into the more difficult, challenging, confronting and problematic side of this style of hot yoga. Whilst I adored the torturous side of it - the challenge of the heat, the extreme poses and the breaking down of mental barriers - in the end, I walked away from it to a different yoga that sticks with me to this day. In this post I want to go through some of the things that started making feel feel uncomfortable with the practice.

Image Source

Firstly, there is a lot of ego in a Bikram room. No one ever tells you are are doing it perfectly for your body shape and type, like they might do in a vinyasa or yin class. Success was measured by how high, how far back, how flexible or strong you were. For many years the Yoga Championships (a competitive yoga completely defies the idea that yoga is a personal journey toward Godhead) was full of Bikram types. It could also be delivered in a militant way - whilst our local studio was run by kind sisters who made everyone welcome and loved, Bikram teachers could be nasty and call attention to you if you weren't doing the pose. This happened to me when I was starting to feel really bad pain in my hips, glutes and lower back. Regressing (or it felt like regressing, where really I was making progress of a different kind - more on this later) - to the back row and attempting to hide, often sitting out of poses because I was in pain, I would dread attention being called to my struggles. Looking back now, what I needed was compassion, one of the cornerstones of yogic philosophy that seemed absent from some yoga classes. Of course, any good yoga teachers reading this would argue that it's not the sequence or the practice itself but the person teaching it, and I'd agree with them. But I've never, ever had this kind of teaching since leaving Bikram. Maybe that world has changed - I hope it has. But I have a few shitty memories of cruelty that were not uncommon. Teachers would call 'Miss Riverflows' and pointedly highlight your weakness, almost brow beating you into submission. Once I left the room in tears and hot fury. I wrote on my status update that night:

Miss bikram teacher, don't draw attention to my struggles and inability to complete a pose in the middle of class. I would obviously do it if I wasn't in pain and I'm not going to give you a run down in front of every one. Its distracting.

You also sweated a lot - there is much debate about whether this was really healthy. I went through a lot of coconut water until I learnt how to make my own hydrated liquid of salt, lemon and honey. I saw a lot of people faint or all out leave the room. Whilst I learnt to use the heat, others could not cope with it at all. We went through a lot of towels, especially when we practiced every single day for a 30 day challenge, sometimes twice a day - there was no way you'd use those stinky sweaty hot pants twice in a row!

And there was something we all ignored, because we loved the practice so - Bikram was getting pretty famous for having sexual allegations against him. I think he's still on the run having been convicted. There was a big moral dilemma in there because we felt his 26 + 2 was a gift. A real gift. It was hard to turn your back on that and we believed that you could separate the art from the man. He'd also been taken to court to try to patent his sequence, and lost - others had begun their own 'hot yoga' sequence and argued you can't patent a series of poses that have existed as yoga for a good hundred years. He also charged studios a lot just for carrying the Bikram name, and teachers were charged around 12,000 AUD to do his training (an equivalent in Australia today costs between 3000 and 5000 at the high end). It was a crazy industry and no wonder studios are few and far between now or have rebranded themselves.

Living the Yoga Dream: Bikram and his wife in 2005

And then, there was the inexpertise of the teachers. This is something I can only say in retrospect, having done a few teacher trainings and having studied some anatomy and forming an opinion of what yoga teachers should be able to do and handle. Bikram teachers were trained in dialogue - many of them did not have the first clue about anatomy or injuries in a heated room where injuries are far more likely. Don't get me wrong - many hot yoga teachers HAVE got a wealth of knowledge, and I loved the woman that taught me. They were passionate, inspired and dedicated, and their classes were fabulous. But if you said to them, hey, my hip hurts when I do this, all they seemed to be able to do was repeat the dialogue. Just listen to the words exactly how they are delivered, was the general answer. But it wasn't an answer at all. Listening to the dialogue was what causes the injuries in the first place. As your muscles warm up and loosen, and the ego kicks in, you're far more likely to get an injury if you aren't careful. Consider the contrast - in the yoga studio I attend now has teachers that tell you to know your limits, to listen to your body, and that recognises that some shapes are simply not possible for some body types. Remember Bikram yoga was a competitive world - some teachers and practictioners would be constantly injuring themselves in back bend clubs seeing just how far they can bend back. Some people's bones are simply not shaped to do that. To tell people to practice and that it would come is a lie, and a dangerous one.

Image Source

Thus, my response to injury was self realised the hard way. Having done years of forward bends and extreme stretching, I had weakened my hamstrings and hips - a wear and tear that many yogis experience, but more in hot yoga rooms than any other style of yoga. No one tells you to be moderate, to listen to your pain. No one tells you it is unnecessary to go that deep - whilst it might feel good in the moment, you end up with constant and often chronic pain later on.

I ended up in so much pain I couldn't surf. I couldn't yoga. In fact, even walking hurt. I remember my husband helping me over a gravel path because I was scared I'd fall. This was from a woman who was so strong the year before I thought it'd last forever. I spent an entire year in pain reading everything I could about anatomy and going to osteopaths and pain management clinics. I was nearly at the point where I was going to accept that this pain was going to be with me forever. I then had cortisone injections, and a great physio who gradually built strength in all those body parts that Bikram wasn't strengthening, but constantly stretching. Eventually, I made it back into the torture chamber, but this time things were different.

I had learnt to listen to my body. I'd bend my knees in poses where I'd be asked to lock them. I would activate my stomach muscles (in vinyasa or more traditional forms of yoga, this is your upward flying lock or uddiyana bandha). I would sit out of poses and meditate if I didn't feel right about them. Gradually, I became strong again, but on my terms. I was grateful for the hot room for bringing me back from pain as much as I was angry for it taking me there. It had taught me invaluable lessons, the hard way.

Bikram had begun to lose his charm and monopoly on this huge industry - the shine was wearing off. My studio renamed itself, taking away his name from the facade and introducing yin, pilates and other classes into the mix. It was becoming an exercise studio rather than a place of enlightenment. They still have Bikram classes, but reduced to 60 minutes to cater for people's lack of time, and they don't run classes every day, which would have disappointed me when I was in the thick of it. Bikram needs you to practice every day. It is a total addiction. I can't even explain how addictive this was. I still miss it, sometimes, like I might find myself craving a cigarette that when I haven't smoked in years.

I started to attend less and less. It didn't quite bring me the joy it used to. I felt I had learnt all I needed to. I began to realise how yang Bikram was - hot, full on, energetic, dynamic - it was the opposite of what I needed. I needed something more spiritual, something that would fill the yoga void that had begun to appear in my life. I missed the days of revelations in quiet rooms in my early Iyengar days, guided by teachers who had studied traditional yoga, and were informed by the yogic sciences and philosophies that gave birth to the modern yoga movement.

And so I left the torture chamber, and never looked back.

---

---

@naturalmedicine II Discord Invite II #naturalmedicine

Discord 🧘About